Not loving this week. In particular, Thursday.

I’m not sure I mentioned it previously, but we’ve been down a car the last week and change after somebody forgot the emergency brake and the Honda rolled back into a gas pump pollard and hyper-extended the open door. As such, I’ve really not had the range of motion I’d prefer, as others have needed my car. Luckily, I was able to work from home (as usual) this week; unlike the previous week and next week, which involved work symposia where we all enjoy the novelty of talking to each other face-to-face, but have to actually put on pants and stuff.

In any case, I’ve not gotten quite the outside/park time I’ve really needed. But, I got through it, and have managed to mostly get the flames tamped down on this work requirement I picked up after somebody dropped it for a few months, and now the contract needs to be awarded by the end of June or the taxpayer gets stuck with a few million in re-licensing fees if the current arrangement expires.

It sucks, but that’s kind of my job to fix that sort of stuff.

That said, I haven’t yet managed to unload my old job managing a particularly ancient and convoluted interface/data conversion project, which I’ve managed to keep going, but can’t give my full attention. That said, stuff is getting done, but not necessarily as fast as we’d all like, and not just because of my split attention – the target system is at least a decade older than I am, isn’t exactly state-of-the-art, and requires a lot of care and feeding by all kinds of analysts and programmers of mostly dead languages.

But, Thursday morning, I woke up to an email from one of the functional leads sent in the middle of the night complaining that a particular system hasn’t been certified to use the slightly-modern data paths, and cc’ing all kinds of high-ranking folks and generally throwing me under the bus.

Problem is, if he’d talked to me or his guys, he’d know that the thing he thinks isn’t certified has been for months, and just passed few hundred business transactions at months’ end. But, of course, when the C-suite is copied on this sort of thing, I’ve had to spend a good bit of the day explaining that things are going along as fast as I can make them, and say, doesn’t that fancy new channel push the data like nobody’s business, and gee, has anyone thought about passing this responsibility on to someone else yet?

I cleared it up, but it sucked. Almost as much as the rather large price tag the body shop quoted me on the Honda’s door, and the drama provided by the kid who was driving it (I swear, I should just schedule the quarterly four-digit repair bill…). And to top things off, as I was driving my five-month-old car home from the park this evening, some kid in an SUV tagged my rear quarter panel. It’s not a lot of damage on the surface, and the fix won’t be too expensive for the kid’s insurance, but it was kind of the perfect bow tied on a really shitty day.

Bleh. I’ve had better Star Wars days…

Anyway; here are some tunes. All kinds of the usual indie, plus some cool stuff like the Kids in the Hall theme song there at #11:

1. “I Wanna Die With My Blue Jeans On” – Fairhazel
2. “Bus” – Begonia
3. “Find the Truth” – The Sheepdogs
4. “Blood and Roses” – The Smithereens
5. “Way Down Now” – World Party
6. “Going to Hell” – Adeem the Artist
7. “Egyptian Cadillac” – Alex Izenberg
8. “The Thunderthief” – John Paul Jones
9. “Rug Busters” – Personal Trainer
10. “Maestro (Tears Don’t Lie)” – Wilder Woods
11. “Having an Average Weekend” – Shadowy Men On A Shadowy Planet
12. “I Let My Guitar Do The Talking” – Buddy Guy
13. “Scared Together” – Silversun Pickups
14. “Doomscrollers” – Quasi